Hi marc9000,
This appears to be the crux of your whole untenable position:
marc9000 writes:
Looking at what is done, not what is promised, isn't fair concerning the historical, actual applications of science, because it requires far more of ID than was ever required for abiogenesis.
Science doesn't reject ID because of a lack of evidence, though the lack of evidence is certainly a severe handicap. Science rejects ID because it stipulates entities and processes for which there is no evidence. It isn't the lack of evidence for these things that is the problem. It's that despite the lack of evidence, ID stipulates them anyway.
What ID has is an interesting hypothesis, that because life is so intricate it might have been designed and constructed by an intelligence. If they started with that hypothesis, stopped disparaging methodological naturalism, and began conducting serious research then they would at least fare no worse than ESP researchers.
But ID doesn't do that. Instead of saying that life is so intricate that it might have been designed, they're insisting that life is so intricate that it
*must* have been designed. Some like Dembski and Behe even claim they've demonstrated this to be fact, and say it with a straight face even though they only present their ID arguments in popular press books and never in scientific journals.
Abiogenesis stipulates that life originated through the same physical laws with which we're already familiar. A theory of abiogenesis that imitated ID by stipulating something equally without evidence, like a life force or some such, would be rejected just like ID.
Because abiogenesis is a process requiring nothing more than the universe being just what it already is, we're confident that if we could somehow replicate in the laboratory the conditions on the early Earth that gave birth to life that we could produce new life. But ID requires something beyond the known universe, an intelligence for which there is no scientific evidence and who prominent IDists like Behe and Dembski openly admit they think is God.
At one point you mention falsifiability. I don't think I'd be very far off the mark saying that very little has been established with certainty about abiogenesis. To the extent that there's a theory of abiogenesis, all it says is that life originated through natural means. How are you going to falsify that, since the same assumption underlies all scientific study?
You think that ID is burdened with requirements with which abiogenesis is unencumbered, but on the contrary they are being held to identical standards. If you think that's not the case then be specific instead of hiding behind generalities.
Touching now on a few other unrelated errors:
He [Judge Jones of Dover trial fame] then could have asked didn’t one Louis Pastuer show, only 11 years ago, that life doesn’t spontaneously arise from non-life?
Not sure how you went so wrong here. Pasteur (not 'Pastuer') died over a hundred years ago, and his work was completely unrelated to abiogenesis. What he showed was that the life observed arising on decaying organic matter (e.g., maggots on rotting meat) was not new life, but merely life that was deposited there later (e.g., flies lay eggs in the rotting meat) or was already there (e.g., bacteria). He did no work at all on
de novo life on the early Earth.
When we require ID to be published in scientific journals, fully engaged in research and testing, and fully accepted by the scientific community before it is accepted as science, aren’t we doing the same thing as requiring an entry level worker to have experience before we allow him to have a job? How can he get experience if he can’t get a start? How can the scientific community accept ID if they refuse to evaluate it because it’s not science? I don’t see evidence that they even get started looking at it before they declare it religion and throw it out.
What other scientific theory has ever received special treatment like this? You mentioned Pasteur. Was his rejection of spontaneous generation accepted before he did his experiments? Was relativity accepted before Sir Author Eddington measured the predicted effects of the general theory? Was continental drift accepted before the evidence of sea floor spreading and directionally magnetized rocks were discovered?
But ID isn't being rejected just because it has no evidence. It's being rejected as inherently unscientific because of its unevidenced assumptions that are so obviously religious in nature. Drop the unscientific religious assumptions and it might have at least a prayer of the scientific community taking it seriously.
When we evaluate the definitions of science, we need to include questions about why the details in qualifications for what is science have been changed over the past 50 or 100 years, and why they’ve changed, and why older subjects don’t have to adapt to new requirements.
Prove you're not making this up and detail the changes.
As we network researchers and resources, can we scrutinize their personal beliefs and goals to the same extent that the beliefs and goals of ID proponents are scrutinized? Since evolution and abiogenesis are claimed to be completely separate issues, is it a philosophical problem if we find that the same people are uniting them as they study them?
If you scrutinize the beliefs of evolutionists and abiogenesists you'll find that they come from a variety of cultures, countries, backgrounds and religions. If you scrutinize the beliefs of IDIsts you'll find that they're predominantly evangelical Christians. Comparing the religious beliefs of the two sides in the creation/evolution debate is not a good idea for the creationist IDist side. Of course, you can always fall back on the old lie of, "Evolutionists are all atheists who are trying to destroy religion."
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Grammar.
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